The article I'm about to link to, by Oliver Reichenstein, is pretty terrible, but it's a good way for me to bring up something I've been meaning to talk about. First, the article: "Apple has been working on its file system and with iOS it had almost killed the concept of folders - before reintroducing them with a peculiar restriction: only one level! With Mountain Lion it brings its one folder level logic to OSX. What could be the reason for such a restrictive measure?" So, where does this crusade against directory structures (not file systems, as the article aggravatingly keeps stating) come from?

Raskin's mac was nothing like what it ended up becoming. Pointing that out seems to lend creditability to the idea that files and folders are a bad idea by relating it to the insanely great product that the first mac was, but in reality, that was one of several good decisions the team made prior to launch that lead to its success. The first mac did have files and directories, so if you think it was a good product then those must not be that bad either.

It not whether I like the first mac, but I think that everyone thinks of files and directories as something essential to computers, when maybe they aren't.

I keep on talking about Design decisions and lock in on here, but it is mostly ignored.

Once you make a design decision about a piece of software as fundamental as directories and files, you essentially lock in that idea.

REST has a different paradigm ... while normally implemented with web services, it could be implemented in other ways (for example, apparently it can be implemented via Email - I have a hard time imagining it but It can).

It is different way of accessing information than files. I know fundamentally lower down somewhere there is going to be a files storing the information or the the values the information was computed on, however that is abstracted away from the user.

It is another paradigm of accessing information.

I think my main argument is, why were files and directories chosen in the first place? Is there a better more modern way of abstracting this out.

Most people at work, when they want to find something out use Google or Wikipedia ... there is no real concept of a file containing information, there is a stream of relevant information, more akin to picking another person's brain.